Freedom and Narrow Escapes

Oh, the cool things you can do to set yourself free:

1) Set your email account(s) to filter emails from specific people so they are deleted before you ever see them.  This way, you won't even have the temptation to read, ponder, savor, or worse, respond to anything that may find its way to you.  Because nothing will find its way to you.

2) Install a nice little IP Blocker on your site, so someone can't see YOU, either.

3) Stop acting like your blog is a tailgate kegger at Beaver Stadium, come-one, come-all.  Be selective who gets in the door, and make sure your bouncer is a big, mean guy with tattoos on his face, a Taser in his pocket, and don't ask if he might possibly be strapped.

In a way, you can make it as if that person never existed. 

And trust me, after the hateful and paranoid and pompous things he wrote to me and about me in that last, bitter email exchange, I wished he never did exist, at least in my life.  There's no Dr. Seuss "Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened," gakky finger-down-the-throat thing to be gotten from this.  This was a disaster of epic proportions and I am lucky, thankful, fall-on-the-floor-and-kiss-the-ground thankful, that in this case, that I didn't get what I wanted.

Shit, what if this dude had said, "I will leave my wife for you?"  Christ alfuckingmighty, then I would have been stuck with a mean, hyper-verbal asshole with a hairtrigger temper and paranoid tendencies (in retrospect, those characteristics were always there, but I was in luuuuuuuuve, and even when I saw them -- he once made me cry with an email and that was when things were GOOD --  I brushed them off).  Someone who can be so abusive with the written word is probably no picnic to live with.  Shoo! Shoo! Begone back to your wife, little man!

(Wipes back of hand across brow)  That was a close one, people.

Not only that, I'll bet he couldn't even name the first lead singer of AC/DC, or the drummer from Led Zeppelin, or how many yards are in a down, or who was the winningest coach in college football, or who is nicknamed "The Great One," or "The Next One," or any of the silly things that I like.  I can just see me holding up a common household tool and saying in my Miss Nancy voice, "And this is called a screwdriver."

It was doomed from the start.  People would have seen us walking down the street together and I know they would have been thinking, "Boy, he must be rich."

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you close a door.

(bowing left, bowing right)

Thank you. Thank you very much.